Dr. Sarah Eccles-Brown, 37

Sarah Eccles-Brown originally pictured herself as an astronaut and the president of the U.S.

But during her senior year of high school, she was required to do a community project to graduate. Her guidance counselor mentioned recently having LASIK surgery and talked about how great it was to see clearly without glasses.

Eccles-Brown was intrigued. She took it as an opportunity to learn about the field, interviewing opthalmologists and patients who had surgery to correct their vision. “I saw how impacted they were, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” she says.